Stop NATO
West Plots To Supplant United
Nations With Global NATO
by Rick Rozoff
http://groups.yahoo.com/, May
27, 2009
Ten years ago it first became evident
to the world that moves were afoot in major Western capitals to
circumvent, subvert and ultimately supplant the United Nations,
as the UN could not always be counted on to act in strict accordance
with the dictates of the United States and its NATO allies.
At that time in 1999 the NATO alliance
was waging what would become a 78-day bombing war against Yugoslavia
in flagrant contravention of the United Nations and of international
law in general.
As two of the five permanent members
of the UN Security Council - the five permanent members being
the main victorious World War II allies, with the People's Republic
of China having replaced the Republic of China (Taiwan) in 1971
and with Russia as the successor state to the Soviet Union - exactly
China and Russia, not being NATO members states, opposed that
war and in several other instances the use of sanctions and military
force against nations targeted for both by the West.
The first indication that the United
Nations was marked for marginalization, selective application
(and exploitation) or even de facto dissolution, however, occurred
three years earlier in 1996 when the United States single-handedly
browbeat the other fourteen then members of the Security Council
to depose Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and replace
him with Kofi Annan, who the preceding year had been appointed
UN special envoy to NATO and authorized the NATO bombing in Bosnia
behind the back of Boutros-Ghali.
Boutros-Ghali was deprived of the traditional
second term for not authorizing NATO's bombing of Bosnian Serb
targets in 1995 and for speaking the truth about the deadly Israeli
bombing of a refugee camp in Qana, Lebanon in the following year
when 106 civilians were killed and 116 injured.
As former Clinton and Bush administrations'
National Security Council counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke
acknowledged:
"[Madeleine] Albright and I and
a handful of others (Michael Sheehan, Jamie Rubin) had entered
into a pact together in 1996 to oust Boutros-Ghali as Secretary
General of the United Nations, a secret plan we had called Operation
Orient Express, reflecting our hope that many nations would join
us in doing in the UN head.
"In the end, the US had to do it
alone (with its UN veto) and Sheehan and I had to prevent the
President from giving in to pressure from world leaders and extending
Boutros-Ghali's tenure, often by our racing to the Oval Office
when we were alerted that a head of state was telephoning the
President. In the end Clinton was impressed that we had managed
not only to oust Boutros-Ghali but to have Kofi Annan selected
to replace him." [1]
By 1999, however, even having a UN secretary
general handpicked and forced upon the world by Bill Clinton and
Madeleine Albright wasn't sufficient to meet NATO's requirements
as it finalized plans for its first war, the Operation Allied
Force aerial assault against Yugoslavia.
The US and its Alliance allies could
not be assured of gaining a majority of votes in the 15-member
Security Council to authorize the war and even if successful in
that regard could not be certain that Russia, China or both would
not veto the resolution.
So the United Nations, whose procedures
and requirements for 54 years had been observed even in the breach,
was now disregarded, downgraded and severely if not mortally wounded,
not yet having recuperated from the blow of ten years ago.
American and NATO subordinate Annan officiated
over the debasement and humiliation of the organization he headed
and never once criticized NATO's waging war without a United Nations
mandate and in open defiance of the institution.
Guarantor Of Peace Versus World's Only
Military Alliance
The Preamble to the Charter of the United
Nations identifies the purpose of the UN's founding in 1945 as
being "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of
war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to
mankind" and "to unite our strength to maintain international
peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles
and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be
used, save in the common interest." [2]
To accentuate and complete the message
that NATO had launched its post-Cold War transformation from Euro-Atlantic
military bloc to self-designated and sole international arbiter
of conflicts within and between nations and of the authorization
of extraterritorial military force, with the concomitant usurpation
of the role of the United Nations, on April 23-24 NATO held its
50th anniversary jubilee summit in Washington D.C.Â
Unveiling what it called its new Strategic
Concept, the summit also issued a Washington Declaration which
inter alia stated "We are charting NATO's course as we enter
the 21st century" and "We pledge to improve our defence
capabilities to fulfill the full range of the Alliance's 2lst
century missions." [3] Â Video clips and photographs
of the summit at the time revealed what 21st Century NATO was
intended to become: With the US's Bill Clinton and Britain's Tony
Blair at the center of other world leaders, the flags of nearly
fifty nations - nineteen full NATO member states, 25 Partnership
for Peace affiliates and others - decked the auditorium. As did
the NATO flag, a facsimile of a compass with its four arms pointed
to north, south, east and west.
The message could not have been more
clear, more irrefutable: A new world organization, an expanded
version of a Western military bloc, was replacing that which had
emerged from the smoldering ruins of a war that had cost over
fifty million human lives.
NATO lost no time and spared no effort
in implementing its plans for the new millennium. In addition
to its military deployment in Bosnia the bloc continued its occupation
of the Serbian province of Kosovo.
In 2001 it inaugurated a military deployment
in Macedonia, Operation Allied Harmony, after armed invasions
of the nation by an extremist offshoot of the NATO-allied Kosovo
Liberation Army based in Kosovo, and later in the year it participated
in the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan where NATO
continues its first ground war almost eight years later.
It insinuated itself into the Darfur
region of western Sudan in 2005 and thus was simultaneously engaged
in operations in three continents in that year.
Or as then State Department Deputy Assistant
for European Affairs and later US ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker
said of 2005, NATO was "engaged in eight simultaneous operations
on four continents." [4]
In the last five years of the 20th Century
and the first five of the 21st NATO had evolved from a regional
alliance based in Western Europe to a global force contending
with the United Nations for the number and geographical range
of the missions it was conducting.
That expansion in both extent and essence
was not limited to frequently overshadowing and nullifying the
role of the UN, but has also been a component in undoing the entire
post-World War II order of which the UN was the cornerstone.
Results Of World War II Undone: Inauguration
Of Post-Post-Yalta World
In early May of 2005 US President George
W. Bush paid what the State Department must have intended as a
"freedom crusade" tour to the capitals of two former
Soviet republics, Latvia and Georgia.
The choices were deliberately selected
to antagonize Russia, which has borders with both, as Latvia has
disenfranchised millions of the minority residents of the country
who are 40% of the total, especially ethnic Russians and other
Slavs (Europe's only "non-citizens"), and has permitted
the rehabilitation of Nazi Waffen SS veterans as "defenders
of the nation," and Georgia has been a thorn in Russia's
side since its formerly US-based head of state Mikheil Saakashvili
came to power on the back of the "rose revolution" of
late 2003 with the assistance of US governmental and non-governmental
funds and direction. That antagonism reached a breaking point
last August with the five-day war between Georgia and Russia.
Bush overtly baited Russia in the Georgian
capital of Tbilisi with comments like "Before there was a
purple revolution in Iraq or an orange revolution in Ukraine or
a cedar revolution in Lebanon, there was a rose revolution,"
[5] "In recent months, the world has marvelled at the hopeful
changes taking place from Baghdad to Beirut to Bishkek [Kyrgyzstan],"
[6] and that thanks to Georgia, "freedom is advancing to
the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and around the world," [7]
as an image of his face was projected onto a giant screen in the
background.
Earlier in the Latvian capital of Riga
Bush delivered a blunt and unprecedented attack on the Yalta Conference
of 1945 and its aftermath. The historical meeting of Britain's
Winston Churchill, the US's Franklin Roosevelt and the Soviet
Union's Josef Stalin in February of that year was denounced by
Bush with such characterizations of the summit as constituting
one of "the injustices of our history," which "followed
in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact,"
and that "the legacy of Yalta was finally buried, once and
for all" in 1991. [8]
This animus against the post-World War
II system that evolved out of the Yalta and later Potsdam conferences
remained a recurring motif for Bush, who in his last appearance
as US president at a NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania in 2008
denounced "the bitter legacy of Yalta" and to demonstrate
what the post-post-Yalta era was intended to be added, "I
spoke those words on the soil of a nation on the Baltic. Today,
on the soil of a Black Sea nation, I have come to see those words
fulfilled. The NATO alliance that meets here this week now stretches
from the shores of Klaipeda [Lithuania] to the beaches of Neptun
[Romania].
"[O]ur Alliance must also decide
how to respond to requests by Georgia and Ukraine to participate
in NATO's Membership Action Plan. These two nations inspired the
world with their Rose and Orange revolutions....
"As NATO allies fight...in Iraq
and Afghanistan, our Alliance is taking on other important missions
across the world. In the Mediterranean, NATO forces are patrolling
the high seas...as part of Operation Active Endeavor. In Kosovo,
NATO forces are providing security and helping a new democracy
take root in the Balkans....NATO is no longer a static alliance....It
is now an expeditionary alliance that is sending its forces across
the world...." [9]
To understand the nature of this abiding,
visceral, monomaniacal hostility toward what with a comparable
degree of venom Zbigniew Brzezinski for years has contemptuously
derided as the post-Yalta world, excerpts from a column by Indian
journalist Siddharth Varadarajan immediately after Bush's Riga
speech of 2005 are quoted below.
"[Bush's] attack on Yalta shows
the U.S. is not interested in cooperative security.
"Historians of the Cold War will
not have missed the significance of President George W. Bush choosing
Riga as the venue for his speech on Saturday repudiating the 1945
Yalta Agreement.
"[W]hen Mr. Bush said in Riga that
Yalta was 'one of the greatest wrongs of history' because it traded
the freedom of small nations for the goal of stability in Europe,
he was not merely echoing Cold War dogma. He was also sending
out a message to the world â¤" and particularly
to Great Powers like Russia and China â¤" that
the era of collective security established at Yalta and later,
at the United Nations, is decisively over. And that if the restraints
placed by this system ever come in the way of U.S. national interests,
they will be brushed aside." [10]
Varadarajan included in his piece this
quote from President Franklin Roosevelt on March 1, 1945 on the
meaning of Yalta as it was understood at the time:
"The Crimea Conference was a successful
effort by the three leading Nations to find a common ground for
peace. It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action,
the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances
of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for
centuries â¤" and have always failed. We propose
to substitute for all these, a universal organisation in which
all peace-loving nations will finally have a choice to join."
[11]
The universal organization Roosevelt
referred to only 42 days before his death was the United Nations,
which would come into existence formally on October 24, 1945.
On the very day that Bush traduced Yalta
and its legacy in Latvia, his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin
said on the same topic, "I am deeply convinced that the essence
of the 1945 Yalta accords was as follows: The anti-Hitler coalition's
leaders strove to build a new international system that would
prevent the revival of nazism, and that would shield the world
from destructive global conflicts," explicitly mentioning
the United Nations Organization and its Charter. [12]
Bush's statement in Riga, "the significance
of the venue" having been pointed out above, was calculatingly
delivered in the capital of a country that has witnessed a disturbing
revival of Nazi revisionism, apologetics, nostalgia and rehabilitation
in recent years. Animosity toward the Yalta principles, including
their most enduring institutional embodiment, the United Nations,
means preferring in some manner what preceded the Yalta conference
to what came after it. That either means the state of affairs
in Europe before World War II or - that during the war years of
1939-1945.
Von Sponeck's Warning: Subverting The
United Nations From Within
This past February Hans von Sponeck,
former UN Assistant Secretary General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator
for Iraq, wrote a probing indictment called The United Nations
and NATO for a Swiss Journal.
It it he warned that "The world
of the 192 UN member states has come to a fork in the road. One
way leads to a world focused on the well being of society, conflict
resolution and peace, i.e. to a life of dignity and human security
with social and economic progress for all, wherever they may be
as stated in the United Nations Charter. Down the other road is
where the nineteenth century 'Great Game' for power will be further
played out, a course which, in the twenty-first century, will
become more extensive and dangerously more aggressive than ever.
"This road supposedly leads to democracy,
but in truth it is all about power, control and exploitation."
[13]
Contrasting explicitly what the above
excerpt had done tacitly, he remarked of his former employer and
its would-be replacement:
"A comparison of the mandates of
the United Nations and of NATO shows clearly how opposed the purposes
of these two institutions are. In the 63 years of its existence,
the United Nations mandate has remained the same.
"The United Nations was created
to promote and maintain worldwide peace. NATO exists to assure
the self-interest of a group of 26 UN member countries."
[14]
In a section of his article titled "21st
century NATO incompatible with UN Charter," von Sponeck added,
"In 1999, NATO acknowledged that it was seeking to orient
itself according to a new fundamental strategic concept. From
a narrow military defense alliance it was to become a broad based
alliance for the protection of the vital resources" needs
of its members. Besides the defense of member states' borders,
it set itself new purposes such as assured access to energy sources
and the right to intervene in 'movements of large numbers of persons'
and in conflicts far from the boarders of NATO countries. The
readiness of the new alliance to include other countries, particularly
those that had previously been part of the Soviet Union, shows
how the character of this military alliance has altered."
"[T]he United Nations monopoly of
the use of force, especially as specified in Article 51 of the
Charter, was no longer accepted according to the 1999 NATO doctrine.
"NATO's territorial scope, until
then limited to the Euro-Atlantic region, was expanded by its
member to encompass the whole world in keeping with a strategic
context that was global in its sweep." [15]
In a following section named "UN-NATO-accord:
incompatible with UN Charter," he exposed a clandestine accord
signed between the secretaries general of NATO and the United
Nations, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and Ban Ki-moon, respectively,
on September 23, 2008, which "took place without any reference
to the United Nations Security Council.
"In the generally accepted agreement
of stated purposes, one reads of a 'broader council' and 'operative
cooperation, for example in 'peace keeping in the Balkans and
in Afghanistan. Both secretaries general committed themselves
to acting in common to meet threats and challenges.
"The UN/NATO accord is anything
but neutral and will thus not remain without serious consequences."
[16]
Shortly after the unauthorized pact signed
behind the backs of the UN Security Council, in addition to the
General Assembly, by NATO chief Scheffer and Ban, who has proven
to be as obsequious toward and obedient to the interests of the
West as his predecessor had been, the Russian press reported:
"Russiaâ¤s representative
to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, said that in the document there is not
a single word on the UN's leading role in ensuring stability in
the world.
"NATO and the United Nations have
signed a new cooperation accord on prerogatives for UN member
states - but have angered Russia by not telling them about it
in advance." [17]
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
was similarly caught off guard and indignant alike, stating ""We
knew that the UN and NATO secretariats were drawing up an agreement.
And we assumed that before the signing, its draft should be shown
to the member states. But it never happened," accusing Scheffer
and Ban of operating secretly and in violation of UN norms.
"The Russian minister said that
he discussed the problem with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
'I did not hear any reasonable explanations. It surprised me,'
said Lavrov....'We asked the leadership of the two secretariats
what it might mean. We're awaiting answers.'" [18]
Another Russian report added, "Russia
has recently vented its displeasure over what it called the â¤"furtive
signature⤠of a cooperation agreement between
the secretariats of the United Nations and NATO, which took place
late last month. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov complained
that this country, a permanent member of the UN Security Council,
was not even consulted on the matter.
"Russian Foreign Minister Sergey
Lavrov said recently that Moscow and other UN members had not
been consulted on the essence of the UN-NATO cooperation agreement,
although, he said, the document contained clauses that concern
the prerogatives of UN member states." [19]
A third source referred to Russian Foreign
Minister spokesman Andrei Nesterenko who, in stressing that the
surreptitious pact was "riding roughshod over Moscow's interests,"
affirmed that "a big question mark currently hangs over the
professional skills of some UN officials, who try to involve the
UN Secretary-General in covert activities." [20]
An Azerbaijani news source added, "If
the agreement, signed in September, is only confirming the status
quo, it can be surprising why the information about it was not
published on the NATO website, which even has a special section
called 'NATOâ¤s relations with the United Nations.'
This fact perpetuates Russiaâ¤s perception
of NATO as a hostile bloc." [21]
In a news dispatch titled "UN and
NATO team up behind Russiaâ¤s back," Russian
envoy to NATO Dmitry Rogozin - who was himself not informed of
the backroom deal - said "NATO should fully acknowledge the
UN's universal role and not try to substitute UN functions."
[22]
In the article discussed earlier, Hans
von Sponeck asked "Is the United Nations accord with NATO
- a military alliance with nuclear weapons - in contradiction
with Article 2 of the United Nations Charter, which requires that
conflicts be resolved by peaceful means? Can UN and NATO actions
be distinguished when three of the five permanent members of the
United Nations Security Council are also NATO members? How can
future violations of international law by NATO be legally prosecuted?
Is an institution like NATO, which in 1999, without a UN mandate,
unlawfully bombed Serbia and Kosovo, a suitable partner for the
United Nations?" [23]
And in a section entitled "UN mandate
makes NATO obsolete," he finished with "Any evaluation
of the UN/NATO pact must take into account that NATO is a relic
of the Cold War; that NATO, as a Western alliance, is regarded
with considerable mistrust by the other 166 United Nations member
states; that a primary NATO aim is to assert, by military means,
its energy and power interests in opposition to other United Nations
member states and that the United States, a founding member of
the NATO community, in the most unscrupulous ways, has disparaged
the United Nations and broken international law.
"It is urgent that one or several
member states petition the International Court of Justice to rule
on the interpretation of the UN/NATO pact of 23 September 2008,
in conformity with the Courts statutes.
"The people of the world have a
right to request such a ruling and a right to expect an answer."
[24]
Parallel Assault On UN's Integrity:
George Soros
Late last September, only weeks after
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had unleashed a military
attack on South Ossetia resulting in a five-day war with Russia,
a New York City daily reported that "Russia's confrontation
with the West is escalating, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
accusing the U.N. Development Program of collaborating with the
financier George Soros to fund Mikheil Saakashvili's rise to the
Georgian presidency." [25]
Lavrov's exact words were these:
"Now regarding what sources are
drawn on to pay for the activities of the Georgian leadership.
I have heard many rumors and reports. I know that they are now
being checked and verified. At a point in the past, I believe,
George Soros sponsored Georgian government members. Now I hear
that the United Nations Development Program spent some of its
funds for this purpose. This has to be sorted out. The chief thing
is that the rules should not be violated on the basis of which
the world body and all of its entities, funds and programs operate.
Somebody privatizing this organization cannot be tolerated."
[26]
Lavrov and his colleagues wouldn't have
to delve too deeply into the matter to discover the truth.
Over five years ago a major English language
Georgian website contained this report:
"The Capacity Building Fund (CBF),
set up with the financial assistance of the UNDP [UN Development
Program] and billionaire philanthropist George Soros to support
governance reforms in Georgia, launches activities and will provide
salaries to Georgian officials.
"In a joint news conference with
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili at the World Economic Forum
on January 22, UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown and George
Soros announced the creation of a CBF.
"'In total, 5 thousand state officials
will receive salaries from this fund. However, the main attention
will be focused on employees of the law-enforcement agencies,'
Director of the Fund Kote Kublashvili told Civil Georgia."
[27]
The American source cited above in reminding
its readers that "Since the breakup of the Soviet Union,
Mr. Soros's OSI [Open Society Institute] has concentrated much
of its pro-democracy activities in former Soviet republics...with
local leaders and their nationalist supporters pledging to sever
ties with Moscow," added more details:
"The Georgian president, prime minister,
and speaker of the Parliament received monthly salary supplements
of $1,500 each; ministers received $1,200 a month, and deputy
ministers $700....
"The program was funded initially
by Mr. Soros's OSI, which gave $1 million, while the UNDP gave
$500,000." [28]
As subsequent examples cited later will
document, the relations between American self-styled non-governmental
organizations, think tanks, the State Department and NATO Headquarters
in Brussels are not only cordial, not only symbiotic, but incestuous,
with key individuals passing from one to another without missing
a paycheck.
The US-based billionaire currency speculator
Soros and the former US head of state worked in perfect unison
when it came to Georgia and the overall objective of isolating
and encircling Russia with hostile regimes.
Think Tank Origins: NATO Undermining
The UN From Inside And Out
The current US permanent representative
(ambassador) to NATO is Netherlands-born Ivo Daalder, who like
so many others of his type cut his foreign policy teeth in the
Balkans in the 1990s. In fact he was the director for European
Affairs on the National Security Council under President Bill
Clinton, where he was in charge of Bosnia policy. Although a Clinton
appointee Daalder criticized his chief during the 1999 war against
Yugoslavia, calling for a ground invasion of the country in addition
to the devastating air war.
The day after President Barack Obama
announced the selection of Daalder for the NATO post, a news account
from his homeland described him as a "liberal hawk"
who was "a signatory to the January 2005 Project for a New
American Century letter to Congress urging an increase in the
number of troops in Iraq. The Project for a New American Century
is a neoconservative think-tank linked to the American Enterprise
Institute, where much of the foreign policy of the Bush administration
originated.
"He often wrote about the right
(or duty) of the international community to use military and humanitarian
action to intervene in countries that fail to meet their responsibilities."
[29]
At the time of his nomination Daalder
was a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at The Brookings
Institution. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations
and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
The day after the Dutch feature appeared,
the print edition of Russia Today television had this to say:
"Barack Obama's administration sees
NATO as the nucleus for a global organization of democracies that
will eventually replace the United Nations, believes an influential
Russian newspaper [Kommersant].
"Washington wants NATO to expand
by inviting counties like Australia, Japan, Brazil and South Africa
and become a global organization tackling not only security issues
but also epidemics and human rights....The next US Ambassador
to NATO Ivo H. Daalder is a great supporter of this idea.
"Daalder, an expert at the Brookings
Institution and a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama during
the election campaign, is a strong proponent of the so-called
Concert of Democracies.
"The idea, coined by the think-tank
Princeton Project on National Security, is that the United Nations
is outdated...." [30]
The source added that "Daalder believes
that NATO is a prototype of the proposed concert, being an alliance
of democracies with a long success record, and can be extended
to the new global organization" and that "a source in
the White House [says] that Vice President Joe Biden is among
the supporters of the Concert of Democracies." [31]
As the American magazine Newsweek reported
late last year under the headline Fighting Wars of Peace, "Vice
President-elect Joe Biden called during the campaign for imposing
a no-fly zone in Darfur and, a year earlier, advocated committing
'U.S. troops on the ground' if necessary. And Hillary Clinton,
the incoming secretary of state, was a forceful advocate of the
interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo during her husband's administration.
"[A]s Ivo Daalder, [a] prominent
Obama adviser, and Robert Kagan have pointed out, between 1989
and 2001 America dispatched significant military force to foreign
hot spots so often â¤" once every 18 months
â¤" that intervention became something
of a standard weapon of U.S. foreign policy, and one with bipartisan
support." [32]
The genesis of the "war for peace"
Concert of Democracies concept under NATO auspices and in opposition
to the UN, at least as far as Daalder is concerned, may have been
in a "guest" column in the Washington Post over five
years ago called An Alliance of Democracies and co-authored by
Daalder and James Lindsay, then vice president and director of
studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
In the article Daalder and his colleague
leave no doubt as to which institution global NATO stands in opposition
to:
"An immediate problem is that the
United Nations lacks the capability to make a difference. Its
blue-helmeted troops can help keep the peace when warring parties
choose not to fight. But as we learned in the Balkans, they cannot
make peace where none exists. And as we saw in the 12 years preceding
the Iraq war, the United Nations cannot enforce its most important
resolutions. The deeper problem is that these reform proposals
do not go to the heart of what ails the organization: It treats
its members as sovereign equals regardless of the character of
their governments.
"The idea of sovereign equality
reflected a conscious decision governments made 60 years ago that
they would be better off if they repudiated the right to meddle
in the internal affairs of others. That choice no longer makes
sense.
"Today respect for state sovereignty
should be conditional on how states behave at home, not just abroad.
"We need an Alliance of Democratic
States. This organization would unite nations with entrenched
democratic traditions, such as the United States and Canada; the
European Union countries; Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and
Australia; India and Israel; Botswana and Costa Rica." [33]
Analogous demands have been voiced over
the past few years by former Spanish prime minister Jose Aznar,
NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and spokesman James
Appathurai and US Republican Party candidates in last year's presidential
election Rudolph Giuliani and John McCain, alternately identified
as an alliance, a concert or a league of democracies. In 2007
the now deceased US congressman Tom Lantos, at the time chairman
of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, said
that "NATO should seriously consider expanding into a global
alliance including democratic countries such as Australia, New
Zealand, South Korea and Israel," and posed the rhetorical
query "Would it not make the (NATO) Supreme Allied Commander
feel more comfortable about upcoming global crises if he would
have a NATO of a global reach?" To which the commander identified,
Gen. Bantz John Craddock, replied: "From a best military
advice perspective, it would indeed be enormously helpful to have
more democratic, peace-loving nations as part of the alliance."
[34]Â
The advocates of the ultimate "coalition
of the willing" call for expanding NATO from its current
28 full members, 22 Partnership for Peace states in Europe, the
South Caucasus and Central Asia, seven Middle Eastern and North
African nations in the Mediterranean Dialogue, six Persian Gulf
countries covered under the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative and
several individual Contact Countries - in total over a third of
the nations in the world - into a comprehensive, worldwide political-economic-military
bloc with members in six of the world's seven continents and with
its eye set on the remaining one, Antarctica.
The nations targeted for the NATO-led
Alliance of Democracies include Australia, Botswana, Brazil, Colombia,
Costa Rica, India, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South
Africa and South Korea inter alia.
From Design To Execution: Ivo Daalder
Daalder would follow up on this initiative
two and a half years later, this time in a forum generously provided
him by the International Herald Tribune, sister publication of
the New York Times, the other main pillar of the American "free
press," and co-written by the Council on Foreign Relations'
James Goldgeier.
The piece in question, "For global
security, expand the alliance," states:
"NATO must become larger and more
global by admitting any democratic state that is willing and able
to contribute to the fulfillment of the alliance's new responsibilities.
"Other democratic countries share
NATO's values and many common interests - including Australia,
Brazil, Japan, India, New Zealand, South Africa and South Korea
- and all of them can greatly contribute to NATO's efforts by
providing additional military forces or logistical support...."
The contribution is urgent because "NATO
militaries are stretched thin by the many new missions they are
called on to perform in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in the
Sudan, Congo and other parts of Africa."
The column raised the stakes to a degree
that is deeply unsettling, fraught as they are with the threat
of nothing less than world war.
"Collective defense, enshrined in
Article 5's dictum that an attack on one member is an attack on
all, must remain at the core of an expanded alliance as it has
in the past. For the United States, such commitments elsewhere
would not be novel, as it already guarantees, either formally
or informally, the security of countries such as Australia, Israel,
Japan, New Zealand and South Korea.
"[A]ll NATO members contributed
to the grand coalition that reversed Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait,
which is not even a democracy. If Australia or Japan were attacked,
would the European democracies simply shrug their shoulders?"
[35]
Far more is involved than the deployment
of troops, warships and warplanes to all parts of the globe on
the arbitrary decision of the major NATO partners, as unparalleled
a danger to the world as that is.
In speaking of Washington's ongoing global
missile shield program - one that could neutralize the potential
for nations, Russia and China come immediately to mind, to maintain
a deterrent or retaliation capacity and thus serve as an invitation
for a first strike - in March of 2007 US Assistant Secretary of
State John Rood asserted that planned interceptor missile sites
in Poland and the Czech Republic "would be integrated with
existing radar sites in the United Kingdom and Greenland as well
as missile defense interceptors in California and Alaska,"
adding that at the time some fourteen nations were already involved
in the plans, including "Australia, Denmark, France, Germany,
Italy, Israel, India, Japan, the Netherlands and Ukraine. Taiwan
is also participating....
"[There] is a cooperative understanding
among the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia,
Israel, Italy and Denmark to conduct government-to-government
and industry-to-industry missile defense cooperation." [36]
The correlation between the non-NATO
nations mentioned as members of a concert or alliance of democracies
under NATO leadership and those being integrated into the global
interceptor missile system is striking.
While still US State Department Deputy
Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs and before
being appointed Ivo Daalder's predecessor as ambassador to NATO,
Kurt Volker said:
"[A]s NATO is active in places like
Afghanistan or Iraq or Darfur, we are working together with countries
that share NATOâ¤s values and that are capable
of contributing to security, such as Australia or New Zealand
or South Korea or Japan, and we would like to find ways to cooperate
with these countries....
"Some countries which, from a geographic
standpoint, see themselves as front line states, have a high interest
in theater missile defense, and other countries say itâ¤s
something we ought to do....For the U.S. there is no such thing
as theater missile defense because we look at missile defense
in a global scale...." [37]
The complement to the above, popularly
referred to as Star Wars or Son of Star Wars, is an even more
dangerous threat: Space war.
Last November Russia, as it has routinely
done for years at UN General Assembly meetings, urged "UN
member-states to join the moratorium on the deployment of weapons
in outer space."
The nation's ambassador to the UN, Vitaly
Churkin, pointed out that "it is on Russiaâ¤s
initiative that the UN General Assembly has been adopting resolutions,
for many years now, aimed at the prevention of an arms race in
space.
"The only one who objected to the
adoption of this resolution was the United States â¤"
this was earlier this year." [38]
Another report revealed that "Washington
does plan to deploy its ABM system elements in near-Earth orbits,
and it is only Russia that can counter such plans.
"In the United Nations 166 countries
have voted for the Russia-proposed resolution on measures to ensure
transparency and build up confidence in space activities."
[39]
As with questions of war and peace, the
United Nations is used by the US and its allies solely to punish
weaker nations and if the UN would ever begin to function as it
was designed to - including attempting to prevent the militarization
of space - it will be bypassed and rendered powerless by a NATO-led
"Alliance of Democratic States."
As recently as a few days ago Russian
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, on the sidelines of the foreign
ministers meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference
in Damascus, Syria, "express[ed] his country's worries over
giving NATO an international mission where it will be able to
interfere anywhere in the world without permission from the Security
Council, affirming that this is very negative and can undermine
the basis of international law and the UN Charter." [40]
NATO No Alternative To United Nations
Conceived during the waning days of
the world's most destructive and deadly war and born two months
after the only use to date of nuclear weapons, the United Nation's
still bears its birth marks. 74 years later the five chief victors
of World War II remain the only permanent members of the Security
Council and alone have veto power. Three of them are founding
members of NATO and all five are nuclear powers, hardly representative
of the world community.
Not a single nation in Africa, South
(indeed all of Latin) America and Oceania have such status.
Also, the 192-member General Assembly
has largely been shunted aside in favor of the five permanent
and ten rotating members of the Security Council, not to mention
events of major world importance being conducted by the secretary
general and other officials behind the backs of even permanent
members of the Security Council as with last September's agreement
with NATO.
The General Assembly represents humanity
not only on a day-to-day basis but in a more substantive and legitimate
manner than ten of its 192 members on the Security Council at
any given time. It must play a larger role in all deliberations.
A revived, robust, empowered and democratized
UN must shift focus from a disproportionate emphasis on negotiating
trade, treaty and other agreements in service to world commerce
and in ceding vast tracts of the earth to interested parties under
suspicious circumstances, as with the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula
to Cameroon and 2.2 million square kilometers of the resource-rich
Antarctic Ocean to Australia recently, to what needs to be its
main objective: Exerting all efforts to eliminate forever the
scourge of war.
The record of the past thirteen years
under the stewardship of Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon has been abysmal.
Three major wars have been conducted by the United States and
its NATO allies, the first against a founding member of the UN,
Yugoslavia, while the organization made no meaningful efforts
to prevent or halt them once started and has even legitimized
them after the fact with assorted resolutions. Even UN resolutions
following unauthorized wars are trampled on, as with the recognition
by most NATO members of the illegal secession of Kosovo from Serbia
last February, flagrantly contradicting UN Resolution 1244 which
commits the UN to "Reaffirming the commitment of all Member
States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia and the other States of the region, as
set out in the Helsinki Final Act...."
However, even with its manifold problems,
the United Nations was intended to prevent the replication of
the horrors of World War II which ended only two months before
its creation. The world would hardly gain by having it further
weakened, sidelined and in effect reduced to a hollow shell by
an expanding military bloc that has already waged wars on two
continents and set its sights on penetrating and dominating the
entire world.
1) Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies,
2004 2) Charter of the United Nations, Preamble  Â
 http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/preamble.shtml 3) NATO
International, May 23, 1999 4) U.S. Department of State, May 4,
2006 5) Agence France-Presse, May 10, 2005 6) Agence France-Presse,
May 11, 2005 7) Agence France-Presse, May 10, 2005 8) Washington
Post, May 8, 2005 9) USA Today, April 1, 2008 10) The Hindu, May
9, 2005 11) Ibid 12) Russian Information Agency Novosti, May 7,
2005 13) Current Concerns (Switzerland), February 13, 2009 Â
 http://www.currentconcerns.ch/index.php?id=711 14) Ibid
15) Ibid 16) Ibid 17) Russia Today, October 9, 2008 18) Ibid 19)
Voice of Russia, October 13, 2008 20) Voice of Russia, October
9, 2008 21) Trend News Agency, October 14, 2008 22) Russia Today,
October 9, 2008 23) Current Concerns, February 13, 2009 24) Ibid
25) New York Sun, September 30, 2008 26) The Permanent Mission
of Russia to NATO, October 2, 20 27) Civil Georgia, March 22,
2004 28) New York Sun, September 30, 2008 29) NRC Handelsblad,
March 12, 2009 30) Russia Today, March 13, 2009 31) Ibid 32) Newsweek,
December 13, 2008 33) Washington Post, May 23, 2004 34) Reuters,
June 23, 2007 35) International Herald Tribune, October 12, 2006
36) UNIAN (Ukraine), March 5, 2007 37) U.S. State Department,
February 24, 2006 38) Voice of Russia, November 20, 2008 39) Voice
of Russia, November 1, 2008 40) Syrian Arab News Agency, May 24,
2009
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